How do I add a home with NO mortgage attached

financegeek

Hi - new user here. I need to add a rental home that is paid off and that generates income (yet has taxes, etc.). Everything I've read seems to start with a mortgage and I don't have one. What is the best way to set this up? Thanks!

Quicken Francisco

Hello @financegeek

Thank you for reaching out on the community and telling us about your issue. I believe what you'd be looking for is an asset account in this case. You can find it in the top left clicking the + on the blue bar. In the list you'll be able to see asset towards the bottom half. You'll also have a register to track the income on the house as well as any expenses.

Please let us know if this helps resolve the issue for you.

Thanks,

Quicken Francisco

jacobs

@financegeek  What exactly are you wanting to track in Quicken? Do you want tQucien to reflect the value of the home? If so, then that's a simple matter of creating an asset account, as @Quicken Francisco stated above. Create a new asset account, and give it a value. But this account will just sit there; it won't change because your asset isn't changing. That's fine if you want it there to include in a net worth report. 

But for tracking income and expenses, it doesn't really matter whether you have the asset account or not. For that, you want to use default Quicken business categories or create your own. You'd want a category for rental income, one for real estate taxes, one (or more) for other expenses related to the upkeep of the house. You can create reports that show just these categories for your tax purposes. 

financegeek

> @jacobs said:
> @financegeek  What exactly are you wanting to track in Quicken? Do you want tQucien to reflect the value of the home? If so, then that's a simple matter of creating an asset account, as @"Quicken Francisco" stated above. Create a new asset account, and give it a value. But this account will just sit there; it won't change because your asset isn't changing. That's fine if you want it there to include in a net worth report. 
>
> But for tracking income and expenses, it doesn't really matter whether you have the asset account or not. For that, you want to use default Quicken business categories or create your own. You'd want a category for rental income, one for real estate taxes, one (or more) for other expenses related to the upkeep of the house. You can create reports that show just these categories for your tax purposes. 

Yeah, taxes, etc. are straight forward as I have an account dedicated to the investment property.

It would be nice if there were a Quicken API so that I could write to the Asset's value by tying Zillow or another API and a Quicken API call together automatically via code.

I guess the asset will have to be "good enough" for running net worth.

Thanks for your reply! (And for that of @"Quicken Francisco" )

jacobs

Quicken Windows has integration with Zillow, so there's the possibility that capability will be added to Quicken Mac sometime in the future. (Here's a link to the Idea request for this functionality; you can add your vote for it by clicking the little grey arrow in the blue box under the first post.)

I understand some Quicken users want this, but I have never understood the need for it. How frequently does your home or property's valuation appreciably change? And how meaningful are these changes in your financial planning? Especially considering Zillow is just making a partially-educated guess at the property's actual value. Since you can look up your property on Zillow in about 15 seconds, and adjust the asset value in Quicken in another 15 seconds, if you do this once a year (biannually? quarterly?) it's always seemed to me not to be a big deal to do this manually for those who want to include their property value in Quicken. 

As for Quicken providing an API for users to utilize, I think the chances of that are pretty slim. The Quicken databases are quite complex, and it would become incredibly hard to provide support if they allowed users to muck around in the data. 

financegeek

> @jacobs said:
I understand some Quicken users want this, but I have never understood the need for it. How frequently does your home or property's valuation appreciably change? And how meaningful are these changes in your financial planning? Especially considering Zillow is just making a partially-educated guess at the property's actual value. Since you can look up your property on Zillow in about 15 seconds, and adjust the asset value in Quicken in another 15 seconds, if you do this once a year (biannually? quarterly?) it's always seemed to me not to be a big deal to do this manually for those who want to include their property value in Quicken.

This is a fair point regarding how often home valuation changes noticeably. You have to understand that I'm coming from my own Google Sheet to quicken which I've written an automatic webhook to pull in real-time property estimates from various sources and automatically uses the mean as part of a graph/report that shows me net worth in real-time.

> Quicken Windows has integration with Zillow, so there's the possibility that capability will be added to Quicken Mac sometime in the future. (Here's a link to the Idea request for this functionality; you can add your vote for it by clicking the little grey arrow in the blue box under the first post.)

Thanks for this!

> As for Quicken providing an API for users to utilize, I think the chances of that are pretty slim. The Quicken databases are quite complex, and it would become incredibly hard to provide support if they allowed users to muck around in the data. 

APIs are actually great for complex databases because they abstract the database itself. And rarely do you expose everything in the database - just the data. I've read through several comments on here in the past few days and there seems to be a misunderstanding of APIs. The API is a logical abstraction (and way of interacting with) the system that it represents and the data held therein. It never changes anything in a database that is not exposed by the AP and there is no requirement on the dev/designer to expose everything (all data) in the API.

Furthermore, part of the abstraction represented by the API are controls that the API designer puts on both the operation (for example, you can't "delete" data with the API if the designer does not allow it) as well as the data type (i.e. you can't put an integer where the database field expects a string and vice versa).

Even a very limited API would go a long way in automation and extensibility of Quicken, IMHO. APIs are almost an expected feature in modern software design, especially those that are cloud (and subscription) based (as Quicken seems to be moving towards)

Thanks for all of your replies, they are most appreciated.

financegeek

One other thought on a Quicken (user) API, I actually think it would increase Quicken's subscription userbase over time.

jacobs

I understand what an API does; I just don't see it as likely for Quicken to open up their databases to outside applications. Quicken Mac and Quicken Windows are very, very different under the hood, so the APIs would likely need to be different between the platforms, or a lot of work would be needed to have a common API that tied into the two very different database systems. There are many software platforms that have blossomed by allowing third-party extensibility; there's never been any indication Quicken intends to go down this road.